Sunday, February 24, 2013

Caress of Twilight--chapter 21

My stepfather and I are watching Stargate, something that I haven't watched since I got addicted to the show, and I noticed something really interesting. Namely, that nobody in the movie ever watched the show before (Seriously. They should wait near the gate for proto-SGC to dial the gate again, send through another malp and see that the guys are okay, and send through more supplies and whatever materials Daniel needs. And then deal with Ra however, because that part of the movie won't change .Artifical stakes are artificial).

Also: Yes. The theory of aliens building (insert old thing here) is racist as fuck. Just because we modern people can't imagine life without computers and slide rules doesn't mean that a 2000 year old scientist couldn't do the same basic calculations with a plumb bob. Humanity: Grow up.

But the other interesting thing is that my stepfather HATES Stargate: SG-1. Hates it. Hates hates hates it. Why? Because they didn't get the same actors. Yes, sports fans. It doesn't matter how close the show got in terms of look alikes (for the record, I like TV!Daniel Jackson more than Movie!Daniel Jackson.) or how awesome Amanda Tapping is, or how good (...or not good) the writing is. (Look, I liked it better when it moved on to Ori and Ancients and decided to leave Insert Pantheon Here alone. I didn't know egyptian mythology well enough, but the Egyptian motifs being thrown everywhere got on my nerves pretty fast. Thor was not a green eyed alien. Thank GOD they left the Authurian legands alone until damn near the end of the show, and *technically* Merlin being a hold-over from Atlantis is supposed to be part of the mythos...I think? It was in That Hideous Streingth.) (Of course, Numinor was too.) My stepfather didn't like the show because they couldn't pull enough money out of their ass to get Kurt Russel instead of McGuyver.

My stepfather is WEIRD.

(My favorite episode is the Groundhog Day one. I can't remember the name off the top of my head, and I broke my google fu trying to remember James Spader's name)

So. On to the suck.

At this point we have three major plot lines. Merry needs to get pregnant before her cousin gets out of hock and her Aunt totally loses it. Maeve wants a kid, and would prefer a fairy ritual to invitrofertalization because Plot, and a gigantic amalgation of magic and nasty is storming across the United States to kill Merry and nobody's doing anything about it because Also Plot. These are three plot lines that we could use to do things with, and while they might not be very fun things they would at least be things.

What does LKH do?

Introduce another, not connected plot. Namely, Merry gets called to a murder scene.

You know, the way that Anita Blake gets called in all the time. Even though her qualifications for dealing with the monsters are basically "I kill them and I am one", and she's about as good at actual police work as a puppy is at particle physics? Merry is exactly the same. EXACTLY. THE. SAME.

But where Anita and Zerbouski used to throw body parts around the crime scene (not kidding) Merry and the female dective merely joke about how the (female, blond) body's lipstick is called "asphyxiation" and how it mimicks the color of a corpse's lips and this is supposed to be funny somehow.(Funny, kids, is watching a fake spaceship land around a fake pyramid and realizing that they modeled it exactly like the great Pyramids of Giza....meaning without the shiny white, smooth sandstone covering that would have been literally blinding. I'd buy pyramids as space-ship docks a lot more if the building in question were shiny white with the gold capstone, the way pyramids really were when they were built. I mean, I assume Ra's ego would make his slaves keep the buildings actively mantained...)

Girl cop's name is Lucy. We find out that Lucy brought one of the country's most powerful psychics into what she calls "this mess" and the poor woman almost died from the shock of her reading. You know, I am assuming that this universe has the Manson Family murders, and Jonestown, and Waco, and the Green River Killer, and about thirty other horrible events I could name, and I think the existance of the Holocaust is directly addressed in the text of the first book, so you'd think the first thing police officers would learn is "don't expose the really powerful psychics to dangerous shit outside of controlled conditions, because you can kill them." It's kind of like keeping an armed guard on the rapists and murderers when you bring staff in to visit with them.

Yeah, they almost killed their prized psychic by letting her handle unsecured evidence while still at the crime scene. I don't think these cops will be an improvement on Dolph and Zerbouski.

Also? this is what Frost is wearing at the crime scene:

The effect was somewhat ruined by his silver hair spilling around him in the wind, as if it was trying to pull loose from the ponytail. A pale pink shirt matched the show hankie in the white suit jacket that matched the slacks. The slender silver belt matched his hair. His shiny loafers were creamy tan. He looked more like a fashion plate than a guard, though the wind gave occasional glimpses of the black shoulder holster underneath all that white and pink.

(...yeah. Daniel and Shaur'e have been down in that cave for how many hours and he didn't find the fucking cartoosh on his own? SERIOUSLY?)

And there is much girl talk while they stand over a dead woman. Because, you know, keeping the more than kind of crazy people away from the crime scene while the detectives do their work is a little too hard, I guess.

(..."What the hell is that?" IT'S A PYRAMID SHAPED SPACESHIP.)

Meanwhile, LKH has Merry take time to comment on the dead girl's weight. Obviously the girl is skinny because she's dieted, and if she were going to die she would have gone off the diet the next day. Because bodytypes don't exist and people can't be twigs naturally (the lucky bastards)

(RINGS DROPPING FROM CEILING=RUN. THE FUCK. AWAY. YOU SHOULD BE UNDER COVER WHEN THE DOG-HEADED MAN SHOWS UP)

And the dieting and too much sun has made the girl look older than twenty three. Yes. We are making judgement calls on a dead girl's lifestyle when we don't even know her fucking name. Maybe she's that skinny and aged looking because she's got cancer? ALS? Maybe she's just had a hard fucking life and she's going out on the town to celebrate FINALLY getting into college?

Meanwhile, Rhys is dancing up and down the beach and humming theme song from Hawaii 5-0. Rhys was a death god so death turns him on. This is absolutely a wonderful character trait in a protagonist. LKH is so *edgy*.

Rhys has nothing on Dexter.

Lucy tells Rhys to fuck off. Merry tells Rhys it's okay, Lucy is just creeped out by the death scene we haven't actually seen yet, and she's taking it out on Rhys. Kids? It is not okay to "take things out" on anybody else. I know that it's a part of life, but--

(Seriously. Are they trying to say Ra is a pedo? WHAT IS WITH THE KIDS IN THE LOINCLOTHS?)

--you know, it's really annoying when the movie you're watching is simultaneously more blog-able and more entertaining than the book you're reading.

And then Frost is all like "Humans mourn death" and Rhys is all "But death is a part of life!" and I'm all like "EVERYBODY IS MISSING THE POINT" because it's not the death itself driving everybody up the wall, it's the fact that everybody died horribly and unnecessarily. It's the evil in the death, and not the death itself, and for the record? The way Rhys is acting? That's a sociopath, folks.

We also found out that Rhys in his god-head (...god help us all. This series made me hate that phrase so much) could raise corpses. We still don't know his god-name, but we do know he was Lord of the Zombies.

I cannot be afraid of a god of death when he's wandering around whistling the theme song from Hawaii 5-0. Death from Sandman was creepier than he is. I think because she really was that fucking cheerful and Rhys is just her without the cool parts.

The chapter ends with Merry and Frost running after Rhys to stop him from doing something "cute" with the bodies.

Only LKH would do "cute" with mass murder.

(...Ra's Jaffa really do blow, don't they? Okay, Okay, next time I promise. I won't derail the suck by blogging about the movie I'm watching. But really...it's a sad sad affair that the movie is just that much better than the book...)

3 comments:

Re the psychic: LKH never thinks of stuff like this, I swear. She'll get maybe halfway ("horrible stuff can effect a psychic really badly!") but then not consider the rest of it ("so then police probably wouldn't risk them at scenes like this").

Merry being at these scenes makes even LESS sense than Anita.

"Rhys was a death god so death turns him on" That does not make the sense that LKH thinks it does. Something can be your domain as a deity without it automatically being your fetish, ffs.

"And then Frost is all like "Humans mourn death" and Rhys is all "But death is a part of life!" and I'm all like "EVERYBODY IS MISSING THE POINT" because it's not the death itself driving everybody up the wall, it's the fact that everybody died horribly and unnecessarily. It's the evil in the death, and not the death itself, and for the record? The way Rhys is acting? That's a sociopath, folks."

Ugh, exactly. There are a lot of cultures who viewed death as the natural thing it is, part of life, etc. But even they generally had the caveat that this applied to natural deaths of illness, old age, to people who lived a full life, etc. A needless, violent death like this, caused by another person rather than fate, would probably be viewed as just as much a heinous crime in many cultures as in ours. Hence why a lot of cultures would also sometimes have gods of 'good' natural death versus 'bad' unnatural or early deaths.

Also, the total judging of the dead woman is disgusting but does not surprise me at all.

I read a lot of true crime, and I mean A LOT OF IT. And the care the cops take when they bring in a specalist is usually pretty intense. First, because they will want to use this person again and they don't want them hurt. Second, because if they fuck up the crime scene the court case is screwed. And I do not think I have EVER read about a civilian specalist being dragged into an unsecured crime scene while the bodies are still there. Usually it's "welcome to our offices, here are the case files, here is a bucket you can throw up in if you need to" or something along those lines.

There is a justifiable streak of black humor in public service institutions like cops and paramedics and ER personell, but that's because they see dead people every day. And they still treat the bodies with respect. And when it comes to crime scenes like the one being described here? They're not playing games with the body or saying that the victim wouldn't have died if she'd worn a different brand of lipstick. The cops working the Green River case didn't care that most of the victims were prostitutes. They cared that most of the victims were people, and that there was somebody out there killing people who needed to be stopped before he killed another one.

LKH has the public's view of the cops, in everything from their methods to their priorities (ie prostitutes don't matter if they get killed, callious attitutde towards the bodies) and that's not good writing. I don't write procedural cop stuff because I don't know how they do things well enough to do it right. LKH shouldn't write it for the same damn reason.